IBM is introducing a major strategy to transform its foundation enterprise platform, the mainframe – now called IBM Z – into a new cornerstone for hybrid cloud IT.
The new IBM z14 machine brings with it hardware and software enhancements intended to generate more mainframe installations in hybrid clouds by making it easier to link enterprise data centers with multi-cloud off-premises deployments.
Because hybrid cloud is rapidly emerging as the deployment goal for large and mid-size organizations, this new positioning and marketing is a mechanism to enhance the IBM mainframe’s role in next-generation hybrid clouds.
The key tenets for this...

Leaders of the OpenStack Foundation presented a profile of OpenStack adoption at the semi-annual Summit in Boston (May 8-10), based on a survey of 1,300 OpenStack developers and users in 78 countries. The Foundation’s key objective: Making clear that production deployments are growing, building on projects begun since 2015, even as some users are testing proof-of-concept (PoC) projects.
This blog will show key data points presented in the survey, looking at OpenStack’s challenges and the path forward for customer adoption and consumption models.
The OpenStack Foundation’s survey found that OpenStack software is having an impact in datacenters worldwide, showing...

Mindful that the move to hybrid cloud is accelerating – and that business priorities are increasingly driving IT buying decisions – Red Hat executives at Red Hat Summit 2017 highlighted the business impact of adopting their portfolio of open-source software products.
The focus at this year’s Summit: Providing developers and IT operators with tools that reduce the number of individual steps needed to complete many repetitive tasks. Integration of functionality, and unified consoles for monitoring and management are intended to reduce operational costs for the business. This approach addresses the “Dev” and the “Ops” personnel within an IT organization...

The world’s data centers are working to adopt Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) – but they are far from reaching their goals. The single biggest challenge in SDI is achieving interoperability between many kinds of hardware. Without that, a data center’s systems become a Tower of Babel, preventing IT system admins from seeing a unified view of all resources – and managing them.
Built to leverage virtualized infrastructure, SDI will be easier to achieve if there are more bridges between platforms – leading to better management. This blog focuses on an emerging management standard called Redfish, which is designed to help make...

IBM’s quantum computing technology, developed over decades, is ready for commercialization. It is a fundamentally different approach to computing than is used in today’s systems – and, as such, represents a watershed in computing history.
By allowing scientists and researchers to model the complexities inherent in natural phenomena and financial markets, quantum computing is a new approach to the way in which computing itself is done. It is different than Big Data analytics, which finds patterns in vast amounts of data. Rather, it will generate new types of data characterizing phenomena that couldn’t be quantified before.
What began deep in the...

Oracle is stepping up its move to the cloud, positioning the Oracle Cloud public cloud as an engine for growing its overall enterprise business.
As more companies move workloads into hybrid clouds, and competition intensifies, Oracle has decided to play to its strengths in security, availability and workload performance. It has taken its own approach by leveraging its engineered systems, running in Oracle Cloud data centers – or in customer sites – as a differentiator in competing with other CSPs.
Oracle knows it is competing with other cloud services that got into the market much earlier than it did: Amazon...

From the start of Larry Ellison’s Sunday night keynote on Sunday night, it was apparent that the dominant theme at the week-long Oracle OpenWorld 2016 could be summed up in two words: The Cloud.
Ellison, now Oracle chairman and CTO, signaled the direction the company is taking – a strong move to support cloud deployments on-premises, off-premises – or both, via hybrid cloud. He identified Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a prime competitor – and reinforced that positioning in his second keynote on Tuesday. Oracle executives spoke openly of the strong influence Ellison is having on Oracle product design, since he...

VMware, known for its software stack for virtualized environments, showed its expanded ecosystem at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. It has made a decided effort to reach into mixed-vendor deployments in virtualized x86 infrastructure – and to connect with other vendor’s public clouds, starting with IBM’s SoftLayer.
The company with the largest installed base of virtualized x86 infrastructure is moving, in multiple ways, to grow its total available market (TAM), even as its corporate parent, EMC, merges into Dell Technologies.
Significantly, it highlighted its connections with open-source technologies that drive many of the cloud computing deployments, both in enterprise data...

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PRESS RELEASE: Victory Index Report for Advanced Analytics

BOSTON, Jun 16, 2014 -- Hurwitz & Associates today announced the findings of The Hurwitz Victory Index Report for Advanced Analytics. Designed as a market research assessment tool, The Hurwitz Victory Index highlights the diverse uses for advanced analytics technology and the vendors who make those applications possible. Some current uses of advancedREAD FULL PRESS RELEASE